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Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04.

Other changes in Ubuntu 11.04

The adoption of Unity on the desktop obviously represents the most significant change in Ubuntu 11.04, but there are a number of other new features and improvements that are worth briefly noting.

The Rhythmbox music player has been replaced with Banshee, a more sophisticated library-centric media player with a broad feature set and lots of useful plugins. It has great support for Last.fm, DAAP library sharing, and managing portable media devices. Already shipping as the default media software in MeeGo and openSUSE, Banshee is becoming the standard.

The decision to adopt Banshee in Ubuntu is sound and was met with strong support during the application selection process at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit. Although the Ubuntu community is very enthusiastic about Banshee, Canonical's manipulation of the Amazon affiliate codes in the Banshee code base—giving itself a 75 percent cut of affiliate revenue that was previously sent in entirety to the GNOME Foundation—has generated controversy.

Ubuntu's Software Center, which provides an elegant user interface for the platform's powerful package management system, got a few significant improvements in 11.04. Users can now rate software packages and post reviews, which will be displayed with the other information when users view the package in the Software Center.

A number of minor theming improvements were also introduced in 11.04. The conventional scrollbar has been replaced with an extremely thin orange rail that runs along the very edge of the window, much like the kind of scrollbars that are used on touchscreen-enabled mobile devices.

The bar itself is obviously too thin to be an easy click target, but a larger drag widget will appear to the left or right of the bar when the user hovers in the vicinity. The widget has up and down arrows that you can click to scroll up or down a whole page. You can also click and drag the widget to scroll to a specific point.

The new scrollbars seem to work pretty well in practice. I was initially annoyed by the popup handle widget, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I use a large form-factor trackball with Linux and typically rely on emulated wheel-scrolling with the ball itself (EmulateWheelButton) as my preferred means of scrolling—an approach that gives me a tremendous amount of fine-grained control over scrolling speed. As such, the slim scrollbars are perfect for me.

Conclusion

The Unity shell in Ubuntu 11.04 paves the way for delivering a more usable Linux desktop, and there are a lot of really impressive features and great design concepts on display throughout. Nonetheless, despite its significant potential and the many ways in which it already improves upon the traditional GNOME 2.x environment, the Unity shell has a lot of rough edges that detract from the general quality of the user experience.

The handful of minor annoyances that afflict the global menubar and the dock add up to a modest amount of frustration during day-to-day use, but that's easily offset by the advantages—especially on a netbook. The terrible app lens, however, shatters the balance and tips the scales against Unity. Unless you are comfortable using the search feature exclusively for launching applications, the app lens is going to quickly become a major annoyance.

I'm hopeful that some intrepid third-party developer will create an alternate app lens with a saner design, but it's probably not going to happen overnight. I'm generally pretty comfortable working with Unity, but I find myself gravitating back towards "classic" mode. The custom classic mode configuration I described earlier—using Docky with a global menubar applet and the GNOME Main Menu—offers the best of both worlds. It's almost a better Unity than Unity.

The comparison I offered of GNOME Shell and Unity in my GNOME 3.0 review still largely stands. I think that GNOME does the application launcher and workspace management system better, but Unity has a much better dock and top panel. My biggest complaint with GNOME Shell is the lack of visual cues on the screen to indicate what applications are running. I think that Unity's panel is better in that sense.

The superior configurability of the Unity-based desktop is currently a big advantage that it offers over GNOME 3.0, but it's possible that GNOME will close the gap in future releases as some of the traditional options are brought back—particularly for theming.

As some readers have likely noticed, I have raised virtually no stability complaints about Unity in this article. Some of the builds during the beta stage gave me all kinds of nasty problems, but the developers managed to straighten it out by the time of the official launch. After doing a fresh installation on release day, I have only seen Unity crash once, and it quickly recovered.

There are only two other bugs I have encountered since the release. One is that the top panel will sometimes spontaneously stop rendering. The second is that launcher tiles from the dock occasionally hang out of place and get stuck. I can't consistently reproduce these issues, but have observed them both a few times during my tests. In general, the Unity environment ended up being much more robust than I anticipated.

Unity is a good step in the right direction for Ubuntu, but it's going to take at least one more cycle to really get it right. They have done some incredibly impressive work so far and have delivered a desktop that is suitable for day-to-day use, but it is still very far from fulfilling its full potential.